


I want you (to be my keeper)

by writergirl8



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Missing Moments, also I hate Jackson if anybody didn't know that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-04
Updated: 2016-05-04
Packaged: 2018-06-06 10:43:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6750703
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/writergirl8/pseuds/writergirl8
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stiles + Lydia's hair</p>
            </blockquote>





	I want you (to be my keeper)

**Author's Note:**

> So, I had an anxiety attack at 3am last night and literally texted this entire thing to Maggie (redstringbanshee on tumblr). When I woke up, I decided that I really liked it, so here it is, copy and pasted from iMessage, with italics added in because I love me some italics. I hope you like it! 
> 
> (PS: Title from Water Under the Bridge by Adele because that is currently stuck in my head.)

**1.**

He's six-years-old and he sees it across the playground, long and pretty and simple, and he likes the way the sun bounces off of it, even if the person who the air belongs to is a _girl_ and his dad's buddies from work make jokes that Stiles is going to break girl's hearts one day, but Stiles doesn't want anything to do with any of them. He likes Scott and Star Wars and Spider-Man and fires. Not girls.

He likes Lydia's hair, though.

**2.**

Red means blood. When Scott asks Stiles what his most favorite color is, Stiles says purple. Scott asks him his least favorite, and he says red because he pictures blood in the sink from his mom's coughing. He's seven-and-three-quarters and his mom just started spending more time in the hospital— weeks, instead of days.

That's when he decides that Lydia Martin's hair is strawberry blond, not red, because red is blood and Lydia doesn't make him think of bleeding.

**3.**

He's eight and he comes into his mom's room after school and talks about Scott and Star Wars and Spider-Man and Lydia Martin and her strawberry blond hair that "you would think was really, really, really pretty, mom,."

He knows from her patient smile that she agrees, that she _knows_ he has a crush on Lydia, but whatever, Stiles doesn't care because Scott's sick of talking about Lydia and his mom never seems to get sick of him jabbering. So he keeps going. He's not ashamed of liking her.

Except some days, his mom thinks that he's trying to hurt her. Stiles goes home with his stories about how Lydia Martin answered every single question right in math class and read her drop-everything-and-read book the fastest— he's going to beat her some day— clutched close to his chest, dying in his throat.

**4.**

He's thirteen and he likes her _so_ much. So much.

He knows that he shouldn't smile at Lydia in the hallway because she ignores him and tosses her hair over her shoulder and walks away so quickly that Stiles often feels worse than he did before. They've had classes together since _kindergarten_ , she has to know who he is (they did a cloud project together in the fifth grade that he's relatively certain rocked her word, thanks) but he's totally invisible to her.

But he thinks about telling the stories to his mom about Lydia Martin, and how happy it made him, and he smiles at her in the hallway again. Lydia's one of the only parts of his mom's death that doesn't hurt— not at all.

That year she starts curling her hair every day for school, and it looks really, really pretty and different. He looks for it in crowds of kids at the school dances, and field trips, and in the audience for the school play because Scott drags him to it ("it's high school musical, Stiles, it'll be funny!")

Lydia knows all the words to all the songs, though, and it makes Stiles smile.

**5.**

Lydia's crying in a stairwell when Stiles turns the corner, and he wants to go up to her, to tell her that really she looks beautiful when she cries and she doesn't need to hide behind the giant curls that she started wearing last year and the lipstick that just recently started cropping up, but he's fourteen and the words get stuck in his throat, stuck in all the years that she ignored him and didn't care about him when he cared too intensely.

He backs away and decides that he's in love with her.

**6.**

Lydia's dating Jackson Whittemore. Stiles glares at them when they make out in the cafeteria. When they make out in the hallway. When they make out on the lacrosse field during tryouts (Scott and Stiles don't make the team, but Jackson does. Because Jackson Whittemore gets everything, now doesn't he?)

More than anything, he hates seeing Lydia's hair in Jackson's hands. He's never stroking it, always gripping it, and Lydia shoes his hands away from her curls. Seeing her in crowds doesn't feel so good anymore, because this is the girl he fell in love with and she's in love with someone else. For real. Not like the time she made out with Ryan Jacobs on the Washington, D.C. trip and everybody talked about it the next day.

Seeing her hair tastes like blood in Stiles' mouth for the first damn time, and he hates it. He hates it.

**7.**

Jackson touches Lydia too roughly, he grips her wrist hard, he shoves her against walls, he says humiliating stuff about their sex life, and Stiles just sits there like a _fucking_ idiot because Jackson is a live wire and he could hurt Scott, he could expose Scott. He could get _worse_ towards Lydia. Stiles glares at him every chance he gets and there's something so resilient about seeing Lydia every single day looking totally impeccable. Like, he gets that she cares about her hair and stuff. But the fact that Jackson airs their dirty laundry in the middle of the hallway and Lydia is able to walk away from him looking untouched? Stiles thinks there's something kind of magical about it. Every day, she comes to school with perfect hair and makeup and clothes and he looks at her because he always has, and because he knows she wants to be looked at, if not by him.

In a world full of supernatural creatures, Stiles thinks there's something ridiculously brave about the face Lydia puts on to come to school every day, even when she's hurting. Most people would call it cowardice. He thinks of it as armor.

**8.**

Lydia's wrapped up in a greenish blue coat and shaking and her hair is so long and pretty and not curly like it was in middle school. Stiles touches her back as he talks to her about what happened and he feels her hair for the first time since the dance last year and it makes his stomach tingle, even as he tries to push the feeling away.

**9.**

She's tied to a chair, terrified and shaking and his dad's gone and she's got a laceration in her neck that shows that she almost _died_. Stiles almost lost her. And fuck, he doesn't understand how her hair still looks so pretty and perfect after all the shit that's gone down in their world. This is the same hair that he saw on the playground as a kid, the same hair that he couldn't pretend to hate even when everybody was on the cooties kick. He's starting to realize that his view of her, while totally unchanged, is so colossally more enormous. She makes him float in a way she didn't before. He can't lose her now— he wants to curl up and talk to her until the world ends.

**10.**

Lydia and her hair are in his room. He's content now; content in all of this. Content to be her friend who also is in love with her, content to sit back and let her be happy, content to have her barefoot on his bed and get to unravel her like the string around her finger.

She's staring up at his mystery board and he has a spare moment to wonder if she thinks he's crazy. But then he meets her eyes and realizes that if there's anybody who's _not_ going to think he's crazy, it's Lydia Martin.

And it feels good and weird to know that.

**11.**

She doesn't sit with stiles and Scott and Malia during their study hall, and it feels weird. Stiles tries not to look, but Lydia's back is to them, and her hair is floating all the way down and it's so soft and smooth and pretty and he knows exactly what it feels like underneath his hands.

It's weird, because he doesn't idolize her in the same way he used to, but then he sees her hair and he gets sucked into asshole middle school Stiles who thought he was in love with Lydia Martin. Like an idiot.

"Can you focus?" asks Malia, frustrated with his inattention, and Stiles offers her an apologetic smile before they both turn back to her English homework.

He's an idiot. He's never been in love. That's what he's trying to fix.

 **12.** He doesn't tell his dad about the nightmares he has the night he finds out that Lydia is in Eichen because he doesn't need to. He obsessed over it until he falls asleep, and when he wakes up, his body is totally locked and he's just shaking with a few tears streaming down his cheeks.

He dreams of her hair matted back like it was the day she got stabbed, the day he realized that it hadn't been enough to pretend to get over her. She consumes him every day, every night, every minute of every hour. He's completely and disastrously in love with one of his best friends. One of his favorite people in the world.

It's because he's looking at her hair that he notices the hole in her head when he visits her at Eichen.

They all gather around Scott's living room and stiles tells them the plan that he came up with running on four hours of sleep, and Lydia's hair looks perfect when he pictures it. She's gorgeous. She's too gorgeous to be real but she is, and she's sarcastic and pessimistic and scared and soft and she cares more than he does and she's so fucking smart - sexy smart. The kind of smart that he'd let blow him up if she told him how she was going to do it before she did it.

(He sprints up to her in Eichen and tells her to shut up and let him save her and she looks just as beautiful as she ever did, and he can't believe he ever thought he could get over her because she survives and survives and survives and he couldn't possibly be more in awe of her.)

 **13.** He's eighteen and here is a list of things he gets to do with Lydia Martin's hair:

-Tie it in knots (risky maneuver but they always untie)

-Blow on it (also risky. She bites.)

-Bury his face in it (super low level risk. Lydia melts like butter)

-Stoke it (she's usually falling asleep when that happens, which is okay, but if he does it during study time she better be in the right mood for it.)

-Brush it (just once, but it was /awesome/ and he'd like at least a million repeats)

-Smell it (she gives him a weird look but then he reminds her of the time he caught her sniffing his flannel and she shuts up immediately)

-Kiss it (definitely one of his favorite places to kiss her)

-Braid it (he's totally terrible, and she usually fixes it in the bathroom afterwards, but she pretends he's good at it and that she hadn't fixed it at all, which Stiles profusely appreciates)

-Wake up to it (and, okay, maybe it's shoved in his face a little, but he doesn't care very much because he likes how imperfect it is and choking in Lydia's hair would not be the worst way to go.)

**14.**

She's holding Scotty's little girl for the first time, and Brie reaches up to Lydia's hair and _tugs_. Hard. She lets out a startled gasp, then rolls her eyes at herself and starts laughing, leaning low to press a kiss on Brie's forehead.

Lydia's shined just as brightly as her hair in their life together, and as she rocks Brie back and forth, staring at her for too long, Stiles thinks that he'll never find anything in this world that she isn't good at. Including love.

 **15**.

He spots a white hair on Lydia and for a moment he thinks his entire word is about to end and he spirals into an emotional crisis about time and how fickle it is.

And then Lydia turns around and brushes some hair out of her eyes and her wedding ring glimmers in the light of the setting sun as she explains a complex mathematical concept to Brie and Shai, neither of whom have any idea what's going on.

Stiles' body relaxes.

Lydia Stilinski made it to grey hair and he was there to see it. She's getting _old_ and he's there to see it, and he's so in love with her. It's actually gross and he's really happy and she asks why he's staring and he doesn't have an answer so he pretends she has something on her cheek and kisses it off, making loud chomping noises to crack up the kids. (It works.)

**16.**

She decides not to dye it one day and Stiles honestly can't believe it took her this long to get here. He knows she's a little nervous about it, so he makes sure to touch and kiss and hug her at every available opportunity. She never says she's grateful, but he knows she is.

After a while, she gets more confident with it, and she still puts on makeup but she decides that she likes her hair better a little shorter now, and clipped up in a bun, her glasses perched on the edge of her nose.

Stiles is still ridiculously in awe of her connection to her body and emotional health— how she takes care of herself for her, nobody else, not even him— no matter how many degrees she has or lives she's saved.

He's thinks that, no matter how many years go by, she'll never stop finding new ways to be brave for him.


End file.
